Category: communication

We met again at the Wemanity Agile Tuesdays, and this time I joined the game “Lost in the Desert”, a self organizing exercise.

In this game, a group of people (around 8) are supposedly flying through Africa when the plane crashes on a desert. All of the participants survive the crash, and they find themselves on a desert with a list of 15 items:

The game begins now, first letting these 8 people think by themselves and come up with their ‘personal’ list on how to prioritize these 15 items. Give them 10 minutes for that.

Once they have it, they have to keep for themselves their own list, and during the next 20 minutes discuss with the group to come up with a ‘common’ prioritized list.

You can guess that the objective of the game is not to the list itself, but more the analysis of the interactions, the thinking and acting behind the process of finding the ordered list. This is our result:

Let me tell you that we have been congratulated by our Agile facilitator, because a regular result of this game is … no list at the end of the 20 minutes! He told us that usually people get lost on discussions and don’t deliver. And you know the saying: “A bad decision is better than no decision”.

To measure your result, compare your ‘personal’ list to the ‘common’ one. For that you could add the distance of objects in each position between the 2 lists. Did you do better or worse than the group? Sometimes you can observe that the ‘common’ list is better than any other ‘personal’ one: collective intelligence worked there at the most!

You could also compare how is your ‘common’ list related to an ‘expert’ survival list? This is just for fun, but I’m sure you are curious as me to learn survival skills for your next holiday trip to a desert 😉

As always in Agile Games, the interesting part is the debriefing after the game: that’s where you reflect on your own behavior, on the other’s ones, and you learn and improve yourself.

How was the process done? (in an ordered way, with shouting and frustrations or calmed?)

Did a vision on what to do emerged (do you stay there waiting for the rescue, try to rejoin civilization,..?).

Did more specific goals have been defined? (to survive, to get help, to get noticed..)

Who emerged as natural leaders?

Did everybody have the opportunity to talk? Remember collective intelligence is usually better than one person’s decision

What strategies have been used for negotiation? Which ones worked better?

If you work in Agile, you can immediately relate this exercise to many parts of the process:

the Sprint planning, where we define the goal of the Sprint, a common vision that will help get aligned the many small personal decisions every team member takes while doing their job.

the role of the SCRUM Master, allowing time to everybody to speak.

defining your prioritize Backlog features… going back to the game, I hope you gave a high priority to your parachute so you could be on the shade during the long hours of negotiation 😉

Want to know the optimal prioritized list? One done by an expert on survival on the wild? Drop me a line and I’ll reveal it to you 😉

That was the final message of last Meetup I attended organized by the Fearless Female Founders group. Madeleine Alvarez, an experienced Business Development Consultant and Trainer, presented us the Personal Model Canvas to help us come with a clear definition of our offer. The aim of her presentation was:

Learn how to package your services and products so that your customers will see their value easier, how to align your offer to the market and how to communicate it better.

Don’t we all want that and flounder to do it? Wasn’t she clear? It’s super important that the person you talk to understands your offer from your first words. After some second, they either classify your talk as ‘interesting’ and keep their attention to your saying, or disengage and just don’t put so much attention to what you say.

The first question is to find the value for our customers of our work, not the definition of it. To help us finding the words that our interlocutor will be interested in, she showed us the Personal Business Model Canvas:

This model helps to differentiate the services (or product) characteristics we are offering from our customer’s covered needs. These last ones, that are described in this model under “How you help”, are the things we must highlight in our communication.

Then, she urged us to find a sentence that could explain our work to a 10 year’s old child. Have you ever tried that? We all know it’s important to be clear, but when working on technological fields we tend to use technical terms, and even if not in technology, usually there are words only known by the ones in the field. We dared her to do so with her job, and she amazed us!

I teach parents to say please and thank you at work, so that everybody works happily and doing their best:
– Please could you give me a report?
– Thanks for your good report.

I went the other day to an Agile Serious Games session organized by Wemanity, and we did nice exercises to illustrate the values and advantages of Agile Management. If you’re not familiar with the expression ‘serious games’, it’s used when playing a game that has a professional purpose, that makes the participants experience a problem and sometimes also a solution.
I would like to share with you the ‘ping-pong race’ serious game:

Create teams of at least 5 people. It works very well with more people, try to keep it in teams of around 10 people, though it doesn’t matter if you only have one team. You’ll need at least 30 ping-pong balls and a basket per each team.

Tell people to group making a circle. One person of the team will take the ping-pong balls from their container and this same person will be in charge of putting the ball that has already been passed to everybody in the basket provided. He’s the only one who will touch two times the ball. Each ball has to be passed to every team member, following these simple rules:

The ball cannot be passed to a neighbor (the person immediately next to your right or to your left).

The ball has to be in the air for a short time when passing it, you cannot put it directly in the hands of the person.

All persons on the team have to receive the ball at one time, except for the first person that touches it twice.

Balls that fall on the floor don’t count. Leave them there until timeout.

The objective is to have as many balls in the basket as possible.

Time the game: give them 5 minutes to discuss how to organize themselves, then one minute to play the game (or more if the group is big).

First time this game is run, they end-up with a small number of balls that completed the assignment. But now comes the key element of this game: ask them if they think they could do better a second time. Let each team discuss between them for 2 to 5 minutes and then run the game again for a minute.

Usually the second time all teams do better. Allowing them again some time to reorganize and running it a third time provides still better results.

The key part of the game is not the game itself, it doesn’t really matter who won the race, nor how many balls were in the basket. The key part is to realize that taking some time-off to think about how you are doing your work in order to improve it is worth the time lost on those meetings. Teams understand the point of the game and that they see that they can improve by self-organization. It makes them interact, communicate and take action instead of waiting for instructions to improve their work. In the Agile-SCRUM methodology this is covered by the Sprint retrospectives.

Image from www.agilest.org

This game is always fun to play, the whole cycle lasts around half hour, and it really shows people the benefits of having time to reflect on how you’re doing your job. And as you are doing it at work, it shows that the management encourages people to take initiatives 😉

In any case, it creates a nice feeling of team-building! It’s definitely worth the try.

Jean-Luc Doumont came last month to the KUL University and delivered a very insightful lecture to rational students and researchers on how to deliver effectively the message on their papers. Effective communication is always difficult, so imagine when discussing complex subjects, specially if the person delivering the message has been isolated and immersed in that particular domain for some time while doing the research!

I found very valuable his insights and they apply to many business situations. So here is a small recap of these tips, but don’t hesitate to visit Jean-Luc’s website for more insights.

When showing figures, don’t forget the labels of the axes 😉 and much more important, use the Title zone.

As shown in previous example, a good title is the one that shows the message you want to pass along.

A message is an interpretation – is what the information means:

Choose carefully how to express your message, it’s important to select the right subject:

A message is a statement – a full declarative sentence. The subject should be about what I’m talking, the verb what I’m saying about the subject:

For a log document, beware of this mismatch:
I encourage you to go to his presentations for more detail on what to cover in the different parts to get your reader hooked 😉

As with any end of the year, it’s time to reflect on the achievements of the year and look forward to the fresh new year. The holiday season is also a time to reconnect with family, friends and why not with our business.

As part of that exercise, one of the project we launched, the “Digital Startup Toolkit“, a virtual program for entrepreneurs, to help them understand and take advantage from the possibilities of the internet for growing their business, has not delivered yet to its full potential.

But our faith on this product is still very strong, and we think that this new year will be the proper timing to redouble our efforts on making this product your success story. We derive a great please on delivering it, moreover knowing that we are giving you the tools that will allow you to improve your business. You know the saying:

Give a Man a Fish, and You Feed Him for a Day. Teach a Man To Fish, and You Feed Him for a Lifetime

Well, our product follows those lines… in a modest way, as I’m sorry to say that our teaching won’t last a lifetime. Technological changes don’t stop, we cannot stop learning!

So what will change for this to happen? What’s sure is that we will refocus on this program to make it better. We strongly believe that we can boost your business, our own global economy and all of us thrive in 2018. See for yourself here how you can benefit from this program.

And you, what are your good resolutions for this year? In any case, I wish you a lovely and exciting 2018 in both, professional and personal sphere.

Very interesting subject, as short videos are being used to do marketing clips to promote a new product, to present your company on internet but also to get a job: some companies ask you to send a small video to do a pre-selection before giving you a real job interview. And some real interviews are done on line, so these tips apply too!

At Waterloo Hills, we do short videos with information on ‘how-to’ going digital: you can subscribe to receive videos, each on a particular subject like how to create you e-shop, or how to take advantage of the data in Internet for improving your business.

And if not for videos, these tips also apply to your video conferences, which are becoming of greater relevance with the globalization of the work-force and also the wide spreading of teleworking.

I collected some of the tips for you, dear reader 🙂

Don’t put the camera at a different height of the main character: filming top down to you will minimize you, filming bottom up is not nice either.

Don’t change too much the camera angles, it’s disturbing.

Look directly to the camera when being informative, assertive, when you are directing a message to the viewer. When looking next to the camera, the effect is like in a movie.

Be aware of the decoration: each object in front of the camera has to be considered necessary or at least not disturbing; else it’s distracting the attention. As a bad example, look at this interview with a frame with a clown in the background!

Don’t wear stripes or peas. Don’t use a shining material, be also attentive to use a material that does not do noises when you move around (your arms for instance).

Use pastel color, so the focus is in your face and not the wall or your clothes. Red is not a good color, it makes people look unhealthy. Light blue and green are more likely to favor you.

I hope this advice will help you create wonderful videos, where the message passes along. Show me yours! I’ll be happy to see the result, I surely be reviewing my professional videos.